COLUMBUS, Ohio - The plan for Chicago was to use the final 10 games starting with Columbus to find a groove heading into the playoffs. Chad Ochocinco Jersey . Well, theyre going to have to reset that to nine games. Antoine Vermette had two goals and an assist, and the Blue Jackets scored four second-period goals to hand the Blackhawks their worst loss of the season, 8-3 on Thursday night. Even though Chicago missed a chance to clinch a playoff berth on their own, the good news was that they secured a spot when Calgary lost to the New York Islanders. Across the board, from the first shift to the end of the game, Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville said of the meltdown. Theres nothing to be excited about. Discount it and throw it in the garbage can. On this night, Chicago didnt look like the team with 99 points, eager to fine-tune their play and anoint their playoff netminder. Starter Cristobal Huet was pulled in the second for Antti Niemi with the score 5-1 and put back in to start the third. I dont think anybody played good tonight, Quenneville added. (Huet) had a tough night. It can happen, but it was contagious tonight. Jackub Voracek scored on a penalty shot and added two assists, and Kristian Huselius also scored twice, while Mike Commodore, Andrew Murray, and rookie Mike Blunden also found the net for the Blue Jackets, 14th in the West. Samuel Pahlsson had two assists and Steve Mason made 38 saves. The eights goals for the Blue Jackets set a mark for most scored at home and tied the franchise record for most in a game. It wasnt an outcome we anticipated, Columbus interim coach Claude Noel said. They are a very good team, and we certainly have a lot of respect for them. Their goaltending struggled a bit tonight and that showed in the result of the game. The Blackhawks have allowed 21 goals in their last six games and are 5-5-2 since the Olympic break. Kris Versteeg, Tomas Kopecky and Adam Burish scored for Chicago. The Blue Jackets enjoyed a 2-0 lead after the first and skated off after the second with a commanding 6-1 advantage. Commodore scored his first goal in 75 games, banking a shot from a sharp-angle deep in the corner along the goal line off Huet at the 32 second mark. Im just glad it went in, the defenceman Commodore said. It was a nice way to start the game. Just past the midpoint, Huselius converted into an open net on a tic-tac-toe passing combination with Rick Nash and Vermette near the Chicago goal. The Blackhawks looked as if they would get back into the game on Versteegs early second period tally, his 17th, a floating wrist shot. But the Blue Jackets responded with the next four to close out the period. I thought the second period set the tone for the game, Huselius said. We played really well and keep the momentum up going into the third. Voracek was then awarded a penalty shot when Niklas Hjalmarsson took him down on a breakaway at 11:02. He beat Huet with a backhand shot for his 14th of the season and the sixth penalty shot goal in franchise history. I didnt do the backhand move for awhile so I just tried it, the second-year right winger said. I was a litle bit lucky because it went under his arm. NOTES: Columbus would have been officially eliminated from playoff contention with a loss. ... The Blue Jackets announced they have parted ways with the Syracuse Crunch, their minor league affiliate of 10 seasons and have signed a one-year contract with the Springfield Falcons, also of the AHL. ... The teams will close out their season series on Saturday in Chicago. ... Blackhawks C Dave Bolland was a late scratch due to an illness. Jerod Mayo Authentic Jersey . Power consumption in September rose 10.24 percent from the same month last year to 322.41 billion kWh last month. The increasing rate was 2 percentage points up from that of August. Ahmad Bradshaw Super Bowl Jersey . Louis, MO (Sports Network) - Adam Wainwright twirled eight dazzling shutout innings and earned his National League-leading 15th victory, as the St. Tom Brady Youth Jersey . Long led all scorers with 22 points and handed out nine assists in the exciting win for Elon (6-7). Drew Spradlin contributed 12 points, while Lucas Troutman added 11. Columbia (7-5), which saw a four-game winning streak come to an end, was led by Brian Barbours 21 points, while Asenso Ampim added 14 in the tough loss. Ahmad Bradshaw Authentic Jersey . Diamondbacks starter Barry Enright allowed two runs on four hits and two walks in five innings. Tyler Skaggs got the win after pitching three shutout frames to end the contest. The Athletics Dallas Braden allowed nine hits in a six-inning start, but gave up only one run. Chad Ochocinco Super Bowl Jersey . The fourth inning featured two home runs, 13 batters and a stretch of nine consecutive hitters reaching base, including a crucial bases-loaded walk by pitcher Jamie Moyer (3-2). The Phillies went from down three to ahead by six, a lead they would never relinquish. Chase Utley hit a two-run shot in the huge inning, while Ryan Howard and Placido Polanco each had a solo homer for the Phillies, who have scored more runs in the last two games (21) than the previous six (20). NEW YORK - Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as Slaughterhouse-Five and Cats Cradle, died Wednesday. He was 84. Governors Arts Award winning author Kurt Vonnegut glances down at his daughter Lilly,7, in this file photo from June 29, 1990, during the New York State Governors Arts Awards ceremony at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Kurt Vonneguts wife, Jill Krementz says the satirical novelist of works such as Slaughterhouse-Five and Cats Cradle has died Wednesday Aprill 11, 2007 at age 84 in Manhattan. [AP]Vonnegut, who often marveled that he had lived so long despite his lifelong smoking habit, had suffered brain injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home weeks ago, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz. The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of a social critic. Indianapolis, his hometown, declared 2007 as The Year of Vonnegut - an announcement he said left him thunderstruck. He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanizing people. I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations, Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists. A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points of view. He also filled his novels with satirical commentary and even drawings that were only loosely connected to the plot. In Slaughterhouse-Five, he drew a headstone with the epitaph: Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt. But much in his life was traumatic, and left him in pain. Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job. I think he was a man who combined a wicked sense of humor and sort of steady moral compass, who was always sort of looking at the big picture of the things that were most important, said Joel Bleifuss, editor of In These Times, a liberal magazine based in Chicago that featured Vonnegut articles.. Jason Pierre-Paul Womens Jersey. . His mother killed herself just before he left for Germany during World War II, where he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs created a firestorm that killed an estimated tens of thousands of people. The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am, Vonnegut wrote in Fates Worse Than Death, his 1991 autobiography of sorts. But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other POWs inside an underground meat locker labeled slaughterhouse-five. The novel, in which Pvt. Pilgrim is transported from Dresden by time-traveling aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, was published at the height of the Vietnam War, and solidified his reputation as an iconoclast. He was sort of like nobody else, said Gore Vidal, who noted that he, Vonnegut and Norman Mailer were among the last writers around who served in World War II. He was imaginative; our generation of writers didnt go in for imagination very much. Literary realism was the general style. Those of us who came out of the war in the 1940s made it sort of the official American prose, and it was often a bit on the dull side. Kurt was never dull. Vonnegut was born on Nov. 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, a fourth-generation German-American religious skeptic Freethinker, and studied chemistry at Cornell University before joining the Army. When he returned, he reported for Chicagos City News Bureau, then did public relations for General Electric, a job he loathed. He wrote his first novel, Player Piano, in 1951, followed by The Sirens of Titan, Canary in a Cat House and Mother Night, making ends meet by selling Saabs on Cape Cod. Critics ignored him at first, then denigrated his deliberately bizarre stories and disjointed plots as haphazardly written science fiction. But his novels became cult classics, especially Cats Cradle in 1963, in which scientists create ice-nine, a crystal that turns water solid and destroys the earth. Many of his novels were best-sellers. Some also were banned and burned for suspected obscenity. Vonnegut took on censorship as an active member of the PEN writers aid group and the American Civil Liberties Union. The American Humanist Association, which promotes individual freedom, rational thought and scientific skepticism, made him its honorary president. 12   ' ' '